The Return of Godzilla
was Toho's first Godzilla film in almost
a decade. Like Warner Brothers' recent
Batman Begins, it's a complete
reboot that takes the series in a serious
direction not seen in decades. All the previous
14 sequels with their three headed space dragons,
freakish looking Godzilla offspring, giant
shrimps, smog monsters and robot Godzillas
are simply forgotten and taken out of the
timeline. The Return of Godzilla is
simply a direct sequel to the original Godzilla
(1954) set 30 years later. Godzilla's
allegorical roots are at long last returned
to here, albeit with a slight updating. By
the early 1980s, the Cold War had now escalated
to its height and tension between the US and
Soviet Union was mounting at an all time high.
Japan, naturally, felt powerless in the midst
of this and this sentiment figures heavily
into The Return of Godzilla. While
director Koji Hashimoto's handling of
the film is somewhat dull at times, it is
nonetheless a rather superb return to a more
serious portrayal of Godzilla. The tragic
element of the story is nicely played up and
the whole film has brooding, dread-filled
tone to it that the franchise now so desperately
needed. Its feel is very akin to such Sakyo
Komatsu adaptations as Submersion
of Japan (1973): the scale is large
and many are caught in the chaotic fracas.

For the story, a fishing boat,
the Yahata-maru, is attacked one night by
a mysterious force of awesome power. Sometime
later, reporter Goro Maki (Ken Tanaka) finds
the wrecked vessel floating out at sea and
boards it. After tussling with a gigantic,
grotesque mutant sea louse that seems to have
murdered everyone on board, he meets up with
a sole survivor: a young fisherman named Hiroshi
Okamura (Shin Takuma). In the hospital, Okamura
identifies the creature he saw as Godzilla
and the Japanese government decides to institute
a complete media blackout on the subject to
avoid mass panic. When Godzilla attacks a
Russian nuclear sub and the Americans and
Soviets begin to teeter on the brink of nuclear
war, the Japanese government decides to choose
the lesser of two evils and make Godzilla's
return public. Godzilla finally comes ashore
in Japan and attacks a nuclear power plant
but researcher Professor Hayashida (Yosuke
Natsuki) notices that Godzilla leaves the
plant when a flock of migrating birds fly
by. Hayashida realizes that Godzilla is drawn
to sonar.

Hayashida thus begins work
on a plan to lead Godzilla to a volcano using
a sonar transmitter and then trap him in the
mountain with explosives. Godzilla, meanwhile,
finally makes for Tokyo. Upon his arrival
in Tokyo bay, a Soviet ship anchored is destroyed,
which accidently causes a Russian nuclear
missile to launch. As Godzilla cuts a swath
of destruction through metropolitan Tokyo,
the Japanese government dispatches the Super
X, a high tech flying battleship, to combat
Godzilla. The Super X is able to bring Godzilla
down with cadmium shells. The Japanese cabinet
finds out about the approach of the Russian
missile and convinces the US government to
send a counter missile. Unfortunately, the
radioactivity from the stratospheric nuclear
collision causes Godzilla to revive. Godzilla
makes quick work of the now out of ammo Super
X. Dr. Hayashida, however, is able to lure
Godzilla away from Tokyo with his sonar device
and onto Oshima Island where Mt. Mihara resides
but will the plan succeed?

After Toho temporarily put
the Godzilla series into hibernation in 1975
with Terror
of Mechagodzilla, many a return project
for Godzilla was considered with possible
foes being everyone from the Gargantuas to
infamous “lost Godzilla foe” Bagan
to the Devil himself to get in on the worldwide
act of cashing in on The Exorcist.
It would take 9 years for Toho to decide on
a proper project. The Return of Godzilla
is a highly effective and much needed reboot
whose virtues are many. There are no goofy
aliens in jumpsuits, colorful monster foes
or creature acrobatics: everything is brought
back down to relative believability, though
the film also lacks the mysticism that Shusuke
Kaneko infused into his 1990s Gamera films
or Godzilla,
Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out
Attack (2001). It's simply a
film about Godzilla appearing in the real,
Cold War-divided world of 1984, director Koji
Hashimoto takes everything very seriously,
quite unlike in his only other film, the exquisitely
ridiculous space movie cliché cornucopia
Sayonara
Jupiter (also 1984). He wonderfully
succeeds in bringing the film a fairly bleak
and foreboding tone not unlike that of Kinji
Fukasaku's Virus
(1980). The film's Cold War-era subtext
is excellently handled, with a particularly
notable sequence showing American and Russian
emissaries both desperately trying to manipulate
the Prime Minister of Japan (played by veteran
actor Keiju Kobayashi) into allowing them
to use nuclear weapons on Godzilla on Japanese
soil. What's interesting is that both
sides are shown to be so much alike that they
agree more with each other than with the Prime
Minister. The Return of Godzilla's
theme is thus not unlike that of The
Last War (1961), made by Toho over
a generation earlier. Both films depict how
the Japanese felt during the Cold War: helpless
and at the mercy of these two warring foreign
powers.

The special effects are once
more directed by Teruyoshi Nakano and are
utterly superb. Godzilla's nighttime
attack on Tokyo is one of the most beautiful
looking and satisfying sequences in a kaiju
film and is particularly an eyeful when viewed
in a theater. It is only marred by some excessive
zoom lens usage and some stock footage despite
the film's massive budget and high shooting
ratio, this time from the frequently pilfered
The
Last War Armageddon finale and explosive
freeway pileup from Prophecies
of Nostradamus (1974). The Godzilla
design used in this film is one of the best
ever: Godzilla looks rather reminiscent here
of his iconic appearance in Mothra
vs. Godzilla (1964) but far more menacing
with a radiation blackened skin texture. He
truly looks like a radiation mutated dinosaur.
The film utilizes both the traditional man-in-suit
and a larger, animatronic “Cybot-Godzilla”
for close ups. Kenpachiro Satsuma, who played
Hedorah and Gigan in the 1970s, inhabits the
suit this time and went through similar hardships
as Haruo Nakajima back in 1954 since the suit
used was built for another actor far larger
than he. The miniatures are built at a smaller
scale to compensate for Godzilla's increased
size (80 meters as opposed to the previous
50 meters) but the detail is still good and
thanks to atmospheric lighting they look very
convincing.

Reijiro
Koroku's score is superb. Of course
his work is not as iconic as Akira
Ifukube's, but his score, if a bit
1980s, is nicely menacing, often lush and
serenely beautiful and overall quite effective.
It's a shame Kuroku was not brought
back for later entries in the Heisei series,
which chose to largely revive the magnificent
but tired Ifukube themes of old.

One of the finest aspects of
the movie is simply how the character of Godzilla
is handled. The Return of Godzilla
could be the finest, most majestic portrayal
of the beast on film. Godzilla is shown to
be as a much a victim as the humans he kills
and his only real crime is being too large
for our human world. There's a wonderful
sequence in Hayashida's laboratory where
the character so eloquently voices his understanding
of the Godzilla mythos and says that “Godzilla
is a warning and I'm just trying to
send him back home”. Here Godzilla is
mythological and the scientific result of
man's arrogant aggression, he is, in
this film, truly and utterly Godzilla to the
core. In the film's detriment, some
of Hashimoto's human footage is rather
monotonous and the film is largely more Nakano's
film than Hashimoto's. Actress Yasuko
Sawaguchi is very dull in her performance
and some of the actor footage could have seriously
used tighter editing. Shuichi Nagahara's
script is workable if formulaic, with many
of the characters rather static in their arcs.
Keiju Kobayashi's Prime Minister and
series veteran Yosuke Natsuki's Professor
Hayashida (a role intended for the late Akihiro
Hirata), however, are very interesting, beautifully
written characters, with the former courageously
doing what is right by his nation despite
massive international opposition and the latter
having a strange respect and admiration for
Godzilla despite the creature's destructive
nature and his parents' death at the
hands of the first Godzilla. There's
an amusing character in the Tokyo scenes who
provides some nice comic relief to balance
the film's grim quality out, a homeless
man played by singer/screenwriter/actor Tetsuya
Tekeda who gets the chance to live large in
the largely evacuated Tokyo while Godzilla
attacks, which is just what I think would
happen if a monster attacked a big city.

When The Return of Godzilla
came to American shores a year later, it got
a wide release but was retitled Godzilla
1985 and altered heavily by New World
Pictures. In a homage to Godzilla, King
of the Monsters 30 years before it, new
scenes were added featuring a now graying
and overweight Raymond Burr, a bunch of wise-cracking
military men, product placement for Dr. Pepper
and the production values of a soap opera.
In some ways, Godzilla 1985 is actually
better: it's tighter and some of the
editing is superior, the opening credits are
fantastic, the sound work is remixed and more
effective (an anguished scream for example
is added as Godzilla plunges into Mt. Mihara)
and it removes most if not all of the monotony
of Hashimoto's original cut. However,
though it takes one step forward in some aspects,
the added scenes, directed by R.J. Kizer (whose
dubious resume also includes the very strange
Hell Comes to Frogtown), brings it
two or three steps back. These new scenes
are positively odious. Burr looks like he's
just there to wait for his paycheck to clear
the bank and the military men, particularly
an obnoxious soldier played by Travis Swords,
crack jokes at the proceedings like in a bad
Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode
with all the subtlety of an aluminum baseball
bat to the cranium. At one point, Swords,
watching Godzilla's rampage, which is
causing untold amounts of off-screen pain
and suffering, goes: “That's quite
an urban renewal program they've got
going over there”. As you can imagine,
these sequences absolutely kill an otherwise
not bad Americanization. The Godzilla 1985
cut also needlessly demonizes the Russians
in a propagandistic manner akin to America's
view of the Japanese during World War II.
Apparently, American audiences in the 1980s
couldn't even tolerate a single Russian
character that wasn't pure, unadulterated
evil. Therefore, the operator on the Russian
freighter, who in the Japanese version heroically
gives his life trying to stop the missile
from firing, actually launches it in the US
version!

All in all, despite the film's
occasional monotony, The Return of Godzilla
is a highly effective film that brings the
Godzilla pop-culture mythology into a (then
modern day) Cold War setting. It would start
another whole series of Godzilla films, often
affectionately called the Heisei series by
fans after the “Heisei” period,
which began when Emperor Akihito succeeded
the Japanese throne in 1989, a year which
also saw the release of a direct sequel to
The Return of Godzilla: Godzilla
vs. Biollante. Sadly, the Heisei series
would largely be marked by contrived plots
and a lack of originality and imagination
at complete and utter odds with the Eiji
Tsuburaya days. Following would be the
equally effective and wonderfully outlandish
Godzilla
vs. Biollante before the films got
a lot worse after that.